Need national corpus for political parties to ensure transparency: Sharma

A national corpus should be created for political parties to ensure transparency in the political process, Anand Sharma, commerce and industry minister, said in his inaugural address at the annual session of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on Wednesday.

Sharma also underlined the need to bring about electoral and judicial reforms to increase accountability. "Policy makers have to make policies and be accountable to the people who elect them," he said.

Sharma also said that crony captalism, which appears to have hijacked the ongoing narrative, is a wrong perception and cannot be sustained. "I refute the perception created with theatrical colors of crony capitalism…this is untrue and it must not be sustained," he said.

Even as there have been frauds in India including the Satyam case in 2009 and the latest being the Sahara story, there is a robust system in the country that demands accountability, Sharma said, adding that there are aberrations, but corrections do take place.

The two main political parties of the country — Congress and the BJP — underlined the need for consensus building at the session.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, deputy leader of the opposition in Rajya Sabha, said that there is need to build consensus on key issues such as simplifying tax regime, foreign direct investment, infrastructure development, power and telecom to take the India growth story forward.